5 ms·

In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when

by maxk42 5y ago

In the article you state "you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate". This implies that when I am acting as a hiring manager I would be screening for "public creativity." I'm trying to understand why I would want to do that. I've been a hiring manager for well over a decade and it's never been something I thought I should screen for. Indeed, in my career the majority of the best coworkers I've had have had little to no public presence online and I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. There is some underlying assumption in this article that I'm not grokking.

simonw 5y ago
I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount of public creativity on display for hiring managers to spot. Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of their skills and experience which can help guide a second round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great talent.
- maxk42 5y ago
  So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a candidate who made it to the technical interview but then couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see when someone posts a really great piece of code in their github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were even the person who wrote the code or not, so the technical interview is their chance to show me they have at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that, there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in github that might make me reconsider a poor performance in the interview and that's never happened to me before. So I still don't understand the premise that candidates with a public presence should stand out more nor the premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never been something I've screened for and I've yet to be convinced I should start.
  - simonw 5y ago
    The advice I gave in this article will work if I am your hiring manager. Let's say I have 10 resumes, and I only want to dedicate phone screens to 5 of them and in-person interviews to 2 or 3 (because my time is finite). If you have some public writing or public code, you are much likely to make it to the phone screen stage. If you're confident that your resume speaks for itself already, you are free to ignore my advice. I had assumed that most other hiring managers are affected by this factor in a similar way to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
- gwerbret 5y ago
  I'll rephrase the GP's question because I'm also curious, and I don't feel your response answered the question. Is there a signal which suggests that "public creativity" equals "good engineer", particularly when the resume already speaks for itself? Or is it purely to compensate, as you suggest, for a possibly poor interview performance? I'm honestly skeptical that such a signal exists (but can be convinced otherwise), except insofar that a person may be invited to give talks _because_ they have demonstrated strong engineering skills or talent -- whereupon, yet again, their resume should speak for itself.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - simonw 5y ago
    I don't believe that public creativity is required for a good engineer. I do believe that candidates with public creativity are more likely to make for a promising interview. Thinking back, I can't remember many cases where a candidate with some evidence of public creativity bombed the interview completely.
- res0nat0r 5y ago
  I think in most companies my comment from the other week holds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846776 IE, unless the role is explicitly "go be the face of the company and smile on youtube and praise our products and their awesomeness", no one cares about your github resume since they've barely looked at your resume before the interview. Just try and demonstrate you know what you're talking about during the interview and can relate some real world experiences in a sane manner, and you're halfway there.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago
  So if the hiring manager does not screen by this, what should I bother then? It does not give me any advantage because you are stating you are not screening for it for FOMO great engineers. Just in the eventuality of a tie? I doubt 1-2 blog posts will be the deciding factor.
  - simonw 5y ago
    For me, they will be. If I have ten candidates and only one of them has 1-2 blog posts about a technology I am using, that candidate is going to be one of the subset that gets an interview.
snowwrestler 5y ago
> I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy. Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to conferences, and working on his press coverage. Very little actual work got done, and we quietly parted ways with him in less than a year. In retrospect, it’s a bit of a “well duh” moment, connecting the dots. But at the time, we all just assumed that there must be incredible substance for him to have such a high profile. I took a big lesson from that: people who are good at building an audience would be a great hire if you need to build an audience. If you need something else, don’t assume the audience (or conference organizers, or reporters) have actually vetted that person for the skills you need. They probably didn’t. Ultimately, he ended up as an executive at another company, with responsibility for raising their profile and finding new clients. His skills and inclinations are perfect for that.
- yurishimo 5y ago
  I can picture someone who fits this profile to a T. I’m sure it’s not the same person but now I’m thinking about how many people could fit this description. Obviously there is a market for these people to exist and for companies who want to pseudo acquire their audience. I wonder what the total number of these folks are in our industry and worldwide…
- jldugger 5y ago
  Yea, it took me a while to realize that the people with amazing stage demos multiple times a year have optimized their career for amazing stage demos; they effectively have a different career than practitioners. Presenting at conferences is not a 10 percent time project you do while supporting the company as an SRE the other 90 percent of the time. You have to spend time developing talks, pitching them at open RFPs, and rehearsing them that a pager somewhat precludes.

by maxk42 5y ago

simonw 5y ago

I tried really hard to make it clear in this post that as a hiring manager it is your job to find great candidates who don't do this. So you shouldn't "screen" for this, in terms of filtering candidates based on whether or not they have evidence of public creativity. But... of course I look beyond the resume that the candidate has sent me. Which means that, as a candidate, a relatively easy way to stand out is to have a small amount of public creativity on display for hiring managers to spot. Sometimes a candidate might interview poorly because they get nervous... but there's clear evidence out there of their skills and experience which can help guide a second round of interviews that help avoid missing out on great talent.

maxk42 5y ago
So the advantage in doing this is for candidates that don't interview well? That doesn't jive with the statement in the article that "you can give yourself a big advantage in terms of standing out from the crowd with a relatively small amount of work", which seems to imply that a hiring manager would prefer candidates with blogs or a twitter audience. When I'm reviewing resumes and someone lists their blog or twitter handle on their resume, I'm going to assume it's because they don't have concrete accomplishments to point to. It's not going to rescue a candidate who has a weak resume from being passed-over and it's not going to compensate for a candidate who made it to the technical interview but then couldn't solve the assigned problem. It's nice to see when someone posts a really great piece of code in their github, but I have no way of knowing whether they were even the person who wrote the code or not, so the technical interview is their chance to show me they have at least a basic grasp of coding. If they fail that, there's nothing short of a ten thousand star project in github that might make me reconsider a poor performance in the interview and that's never happened to me before. So I still don't understand the premise that candidates with a public presence should stand out more nor the premise that if I'm a candidate a small public presence would help me. I could be wrong - it could be that most managers like to see this sort of thing, but it's never been something I've screened for and I've yet to be convinced I should start.
- simonw 5y ago
  The advice I gave in this article will work if I am your hiring manager. Let's say I have 10 resumes, and I only want to dedicate phone screens to 5 of them and in-person interviews to 2 or 3 (because my time is finite). If you have some public writing or public code, you are much likely to make it to the phone screen stage. If you're confident that your resume speaks for itself already, you are free to ignore my advice. I had assumed that most other hiring managers are affected by this factor in a similar way to me, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
gwerbret 5y ago
I'll rephrase the GP's question because I'm also curious, and I don't feel your response answered the question. Is there a signal which suggests that "public creativity" equals "good engineer", particularly when the resume already speaks for itself? Or is it purely to compensate, as you suggest, for a possibly poor interview performance? I'm honestly skeptical that such a signal exists (but can be convinced otherwise), except insofar that a person may be invited to give talks _because_ they have demonstrated strong engineering skills or talent -- whereupon, yet again, their resume should speak for itself.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- simonw 5y ago
  I don't believe that public creativity is required for a good engineer. I do believe that candidates with public creativity are more likely to make for a promising interview. Thinking back, I can't remember many cases where a candidate with some evidence of public creativity bombed the interview completely.
res0nat0r 5y ago
I think in most companies my comment from the other week holds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27846776 IE, unless the role is explicitly "go be the face of the company and smile on youtube and praise our products and their awesomeness", no one cares about your github resume since they've barely looked at your resume before the interview. Just try and demonstrate you know what you're talking about during the interview and can relate some real world experiences in a sane manner, and you're halfway there.
Ostrogodsky 5y ago
So if the hiring manager does not screen by this, what should I bother then? It does not give me any advantage because you are stating you are not screening for it for FOMO great engineers. Just in the eventuality of a tie? I doubt 1-2 blog posts will be the deciding factor.
- simonw 5y ago
  For me, they will be. If I have ten candidates and only one of them has 1-2 blog posts about a technology I am using, that candidate is going to be one of the subset that gets an interview.

snowwrestler 5y ago

> I can think of at least one counterexample of a person who was extremely prolific with blogging and giving talks at conferences who happened to be absolutely garbage at their role. My employer once hired someone into a leadership role who we all knew from conferences and press coverage. We were pretty excited to land such a high-profile guy. Turned out, he spent most of his time prepping and going to conferences, and working on his press coverage. Very little actual work got done, and we quietly parted ways with him in less than a year. In retrospect, it’s a bit of a “well duh” moment, connecting the dots. But at the time, we all just assumed that there must be incredible substance for him to have such a high profile. I took a big lesson from that: people who are good at building an audience would be a great hire if you need to build an audience. If you need something else, don’t assume the audience (or conference organizers, or reporters) have actually vetted that person for the skills you need. They probably didn’t. Ultimately, he ended up as an executive at another company, with responsibility for raising their profile and finding new clients. His skills and inclinations are perfect for that.

yurishimo 5y ago
I can picture someone who fits this profile to a T. I’m sure it’s not the same person but now I’m thinking about how many people could fit this description. Obviously there is a market for these people to exist and for companies who want to pseudo acquire their audience. I wonder what the total number of these folks are in our industry and worldwide…
jldugger 5y ago
Yea, it took me a while to realize that the people with amazing stage demos multiple times a year have optimized their career for amazing stage demos; they effectively have a different career than practitioners. Presenting at conferences is not a 10 percent time project you do while supporting the company as an SRE the other 90 percent of the time. You have to spend time developing talks, pitching them at open RFPs, and rehearsing them that a pager somewhat precludes.